Basically, I could look down a list of names and events and pinpoint exactly where and how I was failing as their youth pastor. Why couldn’t I do more? Why couldn’t I get this person back on track? It wasn’t hard to slip from “I’m a failure as a youth pastor” to “I’m a failure as a human being.”
Thankfully, these moments of pity, regret, and incompetence were, for the most part, fleeting. But they raised a question: what about when those moments aren’t fleeting. What about those who live in the shadows of believing that he or she is truly a failure?
To add upon the woes is the well-meaning pastor, author, friend who points the Great Commandment as the essence of life: you need to love your God with your whole self and love your neighbor as your self. After pontificating on why and how we love God (“with my whole self? But I’m a failure.”), he or she moves into on how we’re to love our neighbor (see opening paragraphs about how I’m lame at that) and finally ends with an encouragement to love our self because that is the basis of how we love our neighbor.
The listener/reader hears: “I’m a failure and don’t really like myself right now. Thus I fail at loving my neighbor since I don’t really do enough. And because I fail at loving my neighbor, I fail at loving God.”
The well intentioned word of grace becomes a word of condemnation to those floundering in their own desperation.
Is there a better way to “love your self?” I think there is. I was recently reading I/2 of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. Barth doesn’t often get credit for his devotional writing. Clearly people haven’t read this section.
The first word is God’s free act of grace. We know ourselves and live our existence as pardoned sinners. He draws heavily on Luther in speaking of our standing as the pardoned sinner. Or in psychological terms: the forgiven failure.
“Behind him there is only the impossible, the sin which he was committed and the abyss of death. It is true that that is always behind him and to that extent he is still a sinner, and under sentence of death. He is saved only in Christ. But it is behind him. He is saved in Christ. He is a sinner pardoned, a peccator Justus.” (I/2, 370).
In loving our neighbor as our self, we see in our neighbor what we see in our self: a pardoned sinner. A redeemed failure.
“We can and should love our neighbor only as the people we are, and therefore ‘as ourselves.’ We cannot meet him in a self-invented mask of love. We can only venture, as the men we are, to do what we to commanded in word and deed and attitude.” (452-453)
This can only take two forms: one of humility and prayer. In humility as pardoned sinners at the service of our Lord. In prayer of reaching with empty hands to receive the love of the God who first loved us.
“In the last resort we can only love the neighbor by praying for ourselves and for him: for ourselves, that we might love him rightly, and for him, that he may let himself be loved; which means that either way prayer can have only one content and purpose: that according to His promise Jesus Christ may let his work be done for and to ourselves and to our neighbor.” (454)
I wish I could go back five years and hear this. I hope I can recall this in five years when I’ll need to hear again. I am a failure. I fail to love rightly. I fail to love well. But I am a pardoned failure and I encounter other pardoned failures. As a people of pardoned failures we live in light of the God who first loved us and pledged his very self to us. As pardoned failures we humbly pray with open hands for each that God’s work might be done and that we might receive love both from God and each other.
Amen.
